Got The Current Time? Your Search Engine Does!
Aug 30, 2007 at 7:15am ET by Barry Schwartz
Next month, AT&T is killing its call for current time feature. One reason? There are too many other ways to get the correct time — and search engines are among those resources. Below, a look at how easy search engines make it to get the current time for anywhere in the world.
Typically, a search in the format of “time in [city] or [state] or [country]” returns the current time for the area you searched for at the top of the search results, for most major search engines.
For example, here’s time in paris from Ask.com:
Ask has also just enhanced this feature more, which we covered last week in Ask.com Adds Current Time Feature For Local Searches. Here is an example of a search on paris, which returns a real time clock for the city that continues showing the current time as you watch, rather than a static view at the time you searched:
Over at Yahoo, do the usual thing — enter “time” plus a city, and you get the current time:
Google? Google has this feature, but I spotted that it stopped working recently. Rest assured, Google said its coming back shortly. When it does, you should get results like this:
image from Digital Inspiration
Microsoft Live Search appears not to support a current time command, at the moment.
Postscript: Google Blogoscoped reports that Google has added their time search back again and added some small improvements to how they handle locations and times.
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